Welcome to the “supTweet” blog – inspired by the “need for feed” – December 21, 2014. Shortest day of the year and the news keeps coming. Let me wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

As rumbles of all-out civil war sweep the Mideast and Iraq and a coalition battles ISIL the US has made an historic move to renew relations with Cuba.

My review of Carlotta Gall‘s “The Wrong Enemy“, an exposé of Pakistan’s agenda and its manipulation by politicians and the ISI of the Taliban and neighbor Afghanistan, is now published here. Especially on point it is as a smoldering Karachi international airport recovers from last night’s attack by the Taliban and the horrible massacre of school children in Peshawar, Pakistan may be at the end of its patience with (or fear of) clamping down on terrorists in North Waziristan at last, as a result of these (and many more) attacks, which have severed peace talk connections. Tiananmen Square‘s massacre in 1989 has passed in anniversary, with hardly a peep from nations and democracies turning a blind eye on China’s one-party tyranny to keep business profits flowing.

*freebies* Many of my blog’s visitors read my advice and walk-throughs on installing a working Joomla locally on their Mac’s Apache server with MAMP. (coming soon Drupal! and a small local PHP/MySQL example input/output DB) They also take away my free pushpin images to make the web a more beautiful space.*freebie* (note: Twitter 1.1 is out and there are issues with my code for complex curating/search criteria – will fix this soon) Plus and new, my coding how-to for taming the wild herds of #’s in your Twitter search/feed widget . Free code, free experience. “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want”

Anyway, it’s important that citizens hear about the [messy] exploding networked world in plain, interesting—or even sarcastic, English (American variant). Big data can overwhelm comprehension in fact or shall we say, sometimes by intent. Winnowing it for friends and cohorts is important. An informed voter (if you are fortunate enough to be in a nation that has a vote) is way better than a blindly angry and uninformed one, if less predictable. Washington DC Weather right now…

Sony Pictures as we know it will not survive the hack of 2014. One of the leading entities of Western Civilization’s dominant achievements—its historic ascendancy over mass entertainment and its evolved muscular organism of production, the cellular structure of deals and finance, of formal and informal artistic neural relationships and the darwinian synapses of expertise that are the tissues of the American film industry we know and love is torn, the patient in extremis, extent of injuries unknown at this time.

Sony Pictures is no longer the teller of a story. Its mortal life crisis is now the story itself and metastasis is plain to see. Deloitte &Touche pay scales made their way through sloppy tech hygiene to Sony’s network and are there for you to read. Untold numbers of private transactions are laid bare. What’s next? A relapse and exhuming of ancient Coca-Cola employee romances? Hush-hush deals at Tri-Star? Sylvester Stallone’s gardner’s tweets?

What’s next is a frantic damage-control campaign, extortionately expensive and either a failure or leaving an organism, a system, so locked-down as to forever stifle the creative energy of a leader of an industry that is the lifeblood of a species of popular culture. If a deliberate strategy of North Korea using hired-gun freelance hackers or an inside job by a pissed-off ex-employee, the hacking of Sony Pictures exploits a fragile system. It pales too, compared to the wider chaos we would see when hardwired Windows 3 control devices and non-updatable Unix control networks for public utilities are hacked. A sequel perhaps? But I digress prematurely.

Sony Pictures, like every multinational [entertainment] enterprise today, is evolved through mergers and acquisitions of [artistic] property and its producers. Network systems and policies of shifting teams are mashed together for projects then dispersed. Their logins, passwords, employment records, sexts, and unpleasant termination hits live like, for-ev-er on servers of (alleged) variable provenance sometimes accessed by laptops compromised by inconsistent security.

The house of Sony Pictures will be crippled by self-inflicted over-continence, at least as the agile pipeline that brought us so many art films and blockbusters. If a parable works here, are we seeing a scripted narrative feature ending in resolution and positive value reinforcement or is it a patient number one documentary in the genre of the unending grainy cable TV screens of WWII? Is the story then a portent for a culture shaken by the magnitude of its frailty?

As film is wont to do, dramatizing history for changing audience tastes and needs, the compelling drama of Sony’s Fall 2014 Blockbuster Hack will totally render out a classic of these times, for the ages. But maybe not the way a Sony Pictures would really intend.

As I look out the cottage window at Martha’s Vineyard Menemshaw Pond, I wonder why the National Park Service regime at Point Reyes National Seashore bizarrely weaponized rules were abused to shut down Drakes Bay Oyster Company. Up the road and all around farming goes on here with no detrimental effects, in fact adding to the charm and loveliness of the island.

Thirty skilled workers will be let go. Customers who have made their way out to the small operation at the end of an obscure gravel road along Drake’s Estero will no longer acquire hours-fresh sustainable shellfish to enjoy right out of the shell or to take home or to be served at San Francisco area eateries.

Sacred Heart Church community picnic, the Lunnys brought some Drake’s Bay Oysters fresh – it doesn’t get any more “local” than this – photo Russ Imrie

Does this make sense? Obviously not, in my opinion. [disclaimer] I have known the Lunnys for five years and the unbelievably partisan agenda they have struggled against is a case in point about abuse of power in our times. The Supreme Court denied hearing their case and on strictly legal grounds, SOTUS has a case, or at least has condoned the “case” some extremists in the NPS cooked up using falsified and scientifically inaccurate texts to rationalize their actions.

Congressional action could change this campaign’s results and the Lunnys will pursue Congressional discretionary support to keep the farm operating. Please follow the links to add your voice and your power to a sensible resolution to this issue.

Thank you and “keep on shucking!”

Russell Imrie

U.S. Capitol SOTU eve, 2011 – photo Russ Imrie

Russell Imrie is a Networking and Content Specialist, webmaster and an American Indian blogger living in the Washington DC area. More opinion pieces are at China Daily Mail (under nom de blog supTweet)